There are many commercially available on and off-line component based application builders such as website building systems, web page construction systems, desktop application building system and mobile application building systems that can be used to create and edit websites and other on-line or off-line applications. The present application refers to website building systems for simplicity but its features may also be applied to the above mentioned component based application builders.
Website building systems are based on the notion of pages which include objects which may be components or non-component objects. Components may be atomic or container components. Container components may be single-page containers or multi-page containers (which include multiple mini-pages separate from each other). Multi-page containers may display a single mini-page at a time (single page display), or may display multiple or all of the mini-pages (gallery/carousel display) a multi-page container may have a fixed display mode (e.g. gallery display only), or may allow switching between multiple display modes. Non-component objects may include relationship objects, views and templates as further described below.
Components may have content, e.g. text for text component, an image for image component etc. They also have additional attributes, including in particular display attributes (e.g. color, frames) and layout attributes (size and position).
Components may be content-less such as a star-shape which does not have any internal content (through it has color, size, position and some other attributes) or may have internal content, such as a text paragraph component, whose internal content includes the displayed text, as well as font, formatting and layout information. This content may, of course, vary from one instance of the text paragraph component to another.
Website building systems may also support inheritance relationships between objects such that when an object A inherits from an entity B (called parent), the sub-elements of A are copied from the sub-entities of B etc.
Website building systems can also be extended using third party applications and components embedded in them. Such third party applications may be included in the website building system design environment or may be purchased (or otherwise acquired) separately through a number of distribution mechanisms, such as from an application store (AppStore) integrated into the website building system, or from a separate, web-based or standalone application repository (or AppStore) operated by the website building systems (WBS) vendor or by another entity. Third party applications may also be obtained directly from the third party application vendor (through an AppStore or not)—which would provide an actual installation module, or just an activation or access code.
Therefore a typical site created by a website building system may have pages consisting of instances of regular components and third party application components. Such pages may also include linking components, which display data items from internal or external data sources formatted using page section templates (known as views) as further described below.
Dialog interfaces are an important feature of any on-line application builder (such as an online website building application). They allow the pertinent system to present information or request input to or from the designer and/or end user.